WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

Tag Archives: export

FPL’s planned-for-a-decade pipeline to the sea just happens to connect
Sabal Trail with an LNG export port. Nevermind that this MR-RV Lateral
was never run through the FERC permitting process: FERC rolled it into
Florida Southeast Connection.

FPL is seeking state approval for a 32-mile natural gas pipeline to
provide an uninterrupted supply to Florida Power & Light Co.’s
new Riviera Beach plant.

Map: Palm Beach Post, 31 March 2012.

The story said FPL was working with FDEP to determine the final route.
It also said:

The project is not related to FPL’s proposed $1.5 billion, 300-mile
natural gas pipeline that would have run from Bradford County to
Martin County. The Florida Public Service Commission Continue reading →

Solar in Florida is not just for Duke and FPL anymore:
Tampa Electric is building 260 megawatt hours of solar power, and
the Florida PSC and Office of Public Counsel are praising it for reducing
coal and natural gas burning.
Even FPSC, which approved the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline boondoggle
only five years ago, is starting to look up and see the sun in the Sunshine State.

FERC filed its rubberstamp approvalbefore filing
Sabal Trail’s
request for more time to finish its Suwannee County connection to
FGT’s Jacksonville Expansion Project,
which leads to Eagle LNG in Jacksonville,
which can export liquid natural gas through Crowley Maritime.
There’s no rubberstamp like the FERC rubberstamp.

FERC did delete the last “unpredictable” clause in this Sabal Trail sentence:

This
coordination must occur while taking into account existing scheduled
gas flows on each party’s respective system during the high demand
of the summer cooling season,
which makes the certainty by when this can occur unpredictable.

Since high seasonal demand has been touted as an excuse for this pipeline boondoggle,
maybe FERC didn’t want to think about summer cooling season,
“which makes the certainty by when this can occur unpredictable.”

We already saw last winter Sabal Trail couldn’t keep the gas flowing
when it was so cold snow fell on Florida.
Now Sabal Trail can’t finish construction because of summer heat.

Pipelines and rivers run through and by farms,
and many farmers have solar panels, so it’s interesting
to see what Farm Bureau has for energy policies.

Farm Bureau is for
fixing FERC by revising the laws that let
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reimburse Congress from
fees and charges on the companies it supposedly regulates.
Many of Farm Bureau’s pipeline policies are
good and sound like it listened to Randy Dowdy.
It gets hardcore about eminent domain.
There are even a couple of items
that, if law, would have been very useful in the recent and upcoming
Sabal Trail eminent domain jury trials.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (L) and Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz shake hands during a joint press conference after their meeting in Warsaw on January 27, 2018. / AFP / Wojtek RADWANSKI

It’s time to stop the fossil fuel industry using Sabal Trail as a political tool
to undermine the overall energy stability and security of the U.S. southeast
for the profit of a few companies from Texas and Canada.
Just like the U.S. State Department recommends for Europe,
FERC should seek to diversify energy supplies by getting on with solar power onshore and wind power offshore
in the Sunshine State, Georgia, and everywhere else.

Photo: John S. Quarterman for WWALS on Southwings flight June 21, 2016, of
site of Sabal Trail Suwannee County M&R Station connecting to Florida Gas Transmission (FGT).

What’s that
“one additional M&R facility,” Sabal Trail?
Is it the one in Suwannee County to feed your fracked gas
through Continue reading →

Senators from two states far away just did what none of the senators
from Alabama, Georgia, or Florida have done:
called out FERC on its failure to do what the judges ordered
about the social cost of carbon for the fracked methane pipelines Sabal Trail, Transco, and Florida Southeast Connection.

Washington, DC, September 21, 2016 —
More than 180
organizations representing communities across America called on
leaders in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and
House Energy and Commerce Committee to hold congressional hearings
into the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) extensive
history of bias and abuse. The groups are also requesting reform of
the Natural Gas Act, which the groups say, gives too much power to
FERC and too little to state and local officials.

“The time has now come for Congress to investigate how FERC is
using its authority and to recognize that major changes are in fact
necessary in order to protect people, including future generations,
from the ramifications of FERC’s misuse of its power and
implementation of the Natural Gas Act,” says Maya van Rossum,
the Delaware Riverkeeper, leader of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network
and a primary organizer of the effort.

“A prime example of FERC’s dereliction of duty to the public
benefit is the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline Spectra Energy
is drilling through Alabama, Georgia, and Florida and under our
Withlacoochee River in Georgia and our Suwannee River in
Florida,” says John S. Quarterman, president of WWALS
Watershed Coalition, Inc. (WWALS), the Waterkeeper® Affiliate for
the upper Suwannee River. He added, “FERC failed in its due
diligence by opaque selection of environmental contractors, by
issuing its permit before permits from two states and the Army
Corps, by ignoring copious new geological and other evidence, and by
giving Sabal Trail construction go-ahead while a lawsuit is still
pending by Flint Riverkeeper, Sierra Club, Gulf Restoration Network,
and others, including construction through properties whose
landowners have not even had eminent domain compensation hearings.
Most egregiously, despite FPL, the source of the $3 billion for this
boondoggle, admitting in its 2016 Ten Year Plan that Florida needs
no new electricity until 2024 at the earliest, FERC refuses to even
reconsider the alleged “need” for this unnecessary,
destructive, and hazardous pipeline. Corporate profits for Spectra
Energy from Houston, Texas and Enbridge from Calgary, Alberta are no
justification for taking local land and risking our water, air,
taxes, and safety.”

It’s time for more people and organizations, especially Congress members,
to ask the Corps for a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement,
after
Sabal Trail side-stepped many of the questions
in a 130-page claim that it had already addressed every recent point from
U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop GA-02, WWALS Watershed Coalition, Flint Riverkeeper,
and Dennis Price P.G. in recent letters to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
If karst concerns alone were enough to move Sabal Trail off of the Withlacoochee River in Florida, and the Itchetucknee River, and to move it to a different
crossing for the Santa Fe River, they should be enough to move it off the
Suwannee River, where the conditions are quite similar.

In case anybody wondered whether Sabal Trail is watching the web for anything posted
by its opponents, note where Sabal Trail said in its included 6 June 2016 letter to Mark R. Evans of the Corps that it first saw Sanford Bishop’s letter: Continue reading →